Cameron's LIVE Coaching Call with Rohit Sheth COO of GrowRev

To me, I know you can interview. I know you know what to say and all the right things to say and when to say them. But the actual action when you're inside the office and how you interact with everybody is much more important to me than any sort of words that you could tell me. I can read your resume and you can be a great fit for sure, but if you come into the office and, you know, rub people the wrong way, that's just going to piss everyone off.

All right, Rohit, nice to see you again. Really looking forward to, to changing gears. I mean, I've chatted with you socially. I've also had you on our Second in Command podcast and then love that you brought my son in as an intern last summer and he really, really enjoyed his experience at Grow Rev. And I got some really interesting insights into your company. But now we're going to switch gears and flip the switch and do this more of a coaching episode. So from you, I'm going to ask you to walk me through what's going well with Grow Rev, what's not going well with Grow Rev, what are you working on over the next month and where are you stuck? And then just for any visibility, you're the CEO of the company, your brother is CEO of the company, and you guys have been building this together for the last six, seven years, right?

Yes, sir. In terms of contextual background for yourself, over the last couple of years, what we've gone through and building the company, we're a paid traffic agency for the most part. And we started to expand our services to be more full service. Right. You know, taking over funnels, automation, creative copy, you know, the whole nine front all the way to back. So we kind of took control of a lot of that marketing because we found that one early stages, if we were just running campaigns and they were providing creatives, it was affecting the way that we could drive profitability. So as we started to grow, we started to bring in team members to, you know, be able to facilitate that. And then over the last 18 months or so, we fought out our ex co founder and there's been a lot of transition on the fulfillment end because he was kind of heading the fulfillment on the back end. So we had to go ahead and over hire on the backside of that as that transition takes place. In the meantime, what we did was as the company was growing, we went and moved into acquisition really for training purposes. For the most part, as you like to say, it's called Aqua hiring. So what we then did is we found that person to replace that, you know, the, the fundamental fulfillment role, who's an absolute killer. And now we're, you know, at that transition phase of not only are we learning to work together, we've known him for years, but not only are we learning to work together, us as a leadership team, but also being Pro Reps 2.0, being a whole new face, being a whole new operation and organization, not only for our clients, but internally with our team members. And I would say some things that we're doing well is we're really putting time and effort into our own marketing. As one thing that we've never done, we've never ever run our own traffic because we just couldn't. We were all built through a referral base and never had ends to be able to do so. Whereas now we've been able to hire to facilitate the growth. So we will be taking on a couple more clients from paid advertising moving forward, which is kind of nice, which that I'm sure is going to bring its own unique challenges, et cetera. But I would say the biggest things that we are challenged with moving forward right now is being very data driven. Externally has always been our superpower, but internally has been something that we struggled with because it's not as easy as setting a target for a salesperson. It's like volume of sales, easy. But how do you do that across the board with a creative team so that they're in line with a client's profitability, which is an interesting scenario which a lot of people don't necessarily think about because I don't want to incentivize our team to line their own pockets at the expense of the client. So there has to be this, this correlation between them being compensated for client profitability and growth and NPS and all that stuff. So I would say that's something that we're struggling with. I wouldn't say necessarily struggling with, but we're still trying to iron it out as much as possible. Of course, culture is always something that can be better. I would say something that we are also doing well is really getting clear on who we are now. We just went through and did the Cameron Herald exercises of going through and redoing our bhag, you know, redoing our executive vision, like doing all of those things. The team Vision, Team Vision 2. Our core values, our mission. We're redoing all of it just as a refresher. It's not a changing a whole lot, but it's really getting more, I would say just more precise on everyday Things, the way that we operate, the way that we're moving forward, the things that we want to promote internally as well as externally for our clients, redoing all our okrs from top all the way down, which has been a big focus of ours going into our next into this quarter. So that come Q1, our busy season, we're going to be off to the races. So I would say those are kind of the top tier things that we're currently focusing on. Of course there is a potential for us to be hiring for leadership roles moving forward as well as we grow. So these are all the different kind of areas that we are spending time to learn, grow and expand. 1.

You know, if I was doing a normal coaching call with you, where we were doing coaching every month, I would know some of these questions already. But as an organization, has Grow Rev ever hired senior people from the outside or have you always promoted from within?

It's been both. So I would say 50% inside, 50% outside.

How many total employees do you have now?

Shy of 40.

So you're at a transition point. What's really interesting, when a company goes, I call it the ones and threes, you go from one person to three, from three to 10, from 10 to 30, from 30 to 100, 100 to 300. There's an inflection point that happens at each transition. When you're at 10 employees, it's kind of like you got Rohan, your brother, and he's got a few people managing people for him. When you've got 30 employees, it's you and he and you've got some managers managing everybody for you. When you go from 30 to 100, you're really bringing in your first seasoned senior outside people to manage and lead. And they've run companies before, they've built divisions before, but it's a different talent set than what you bring in in the early days. In the early days, you tend to hire the jack of all trades, master of none, and you kind of give them responsibilities and they figure it out. You're at the stage now where you're going to be bringing people in from the outside who have done it before. They have their own systems, they have their methodologies, some of which are going to be great for Grow Rev. Some are going to be very detrimental for Grow Rev. You want to be very cautious and look for the ripple effects that some of these cause. Every person you bring in from the outside are going to be like a big boulder that you're going to drop into the Grow Rev pond. Their job is to sink to the bottom of the pond. And they will, they'll sink perfectly to the bottom of the pond. But they're going to cause all these ripple effects. And your job as the leadership team is to look out for those ripple effects over the first one to three months, because some of them are going to be very good and some of them are going to be potentially very detrimental. The key thing to watch for is culture, that you've got to be very careful when you bring people into your company, that you don't get enamored with the skill set that they have unless they actually match the cultural DNA of your company as well. If you're hiring people from different cities, you know, you guys are largely based in Vancouver, I guess would be your. Your head office would be Vancouver. I know you've got employees globally, but would you. Would about 50% of your employees be Vancouver based?

It's a little bit less than 50, but yeah, it's also ever growing, expanding quickly.

Will you ever hire leadership team members that are outside of Vancouver, or do you want them all to be in Vancouver?

Yeah, so two of them are already outside of Vancouver, but they have a very tight travel schedule to be in the office quite often.

And where are they? Where are they based?

Normally, one's in Australia and one's in Houston.

So Australia, very similar to Canada in terms of the DNA. Toronto, not so much. The approach of a human in Toronto and approach of a human in Vancouver, very, very different. Have you ever hired people that have worked for big companies before? Like, I'm talking of, you know, the 300 or a thousand employees.

Nope. No.

I made a massive mistake years ago when I was hiring the head of marketing at 1, 800 got junk. And I was super excited because he seemed like he fit the part. You know, he walked in with like a little hipster. He had the shoulder bag and long hair, and he looked like he fit the part. He was the head of marketing for McDonald's Canada, head of marketing for Dairy Queen Canada. And I was like, wow, he's going to be great. He came in very corporate. Literally his first question was, who fills out the FedEx slips? I'm like, holy, you're filling out your own FedEx lip. Like, I didn't even understand. We found out within about a month he was a corporate person versus an entrepreneurial person. When I left the company, Brian replaced me with the former president of Starbucks usa. And she came in and said, wow, what a cute little company. And she did not like franchising. She didn't like the entrepreneurial environment, didn't like the blue wig culture. She was a real corporate person. So be very careful with that because we can often get enamored with people's skills. But really, really honing on the interviews much more than you normally would on the cultural side of things.

I said to this last gentleman that I interviewed, he similar thing. He came from a very large firm in Canada. The one thing that I realized, going through plenty of interviews, like, we did a bunch and then we narrowed it down to like four. And now we're still going, hey, maybe let's open that, that funnel back up even wider once more. But when I was interviewing the last gentleman, everyone on our team, our leadership team and our board thought was the best candidate, I would say one thing that I'm good at is reading people. And when we were having a conversation, when it comes to the culture side of things, he would be a culture fit. Absolutely. The one thing that kind of like perked my ears was these guys are very well spoken when they're enterprise level. He knows how to do a meeting, he knows how to interview. He said something at the end, he's like, sometimes I'll take interviews just to see if my, my skills are still sharp. And I was like, hmm, that's interesting. And when he asked me, he's like, hey, so, like, do you have any questions for me? I said, honestly, no, I don't have any questions for you, because what I want to know, I'll only know when you come to the office and hang around with everybody in the office. To me, I know you can interview. I know you know what to say and all the right things to say and when to say them. But the actual action when you're inside the office and how you interact with everybody is much more important to me than any sort of words that you could tell me. I can read your resume and you can be a great fit, for sure. But if you come into the office and, you know, rub people the wrong way, that's just going to piss everyone off. At the end of the day.

I'd recommend that you and your management team all read the book who by Jeff Smart. And I'll read the chapter. I'll send it to you from Double double on people, which covers the interviewing processes that I've always used. There's actually systems in place from the book who and from my chapter Double double on People. It's even in my invest in your leaders course that will give you the systems to know how to interview these Candidates so that you know everything about them before they come to your office to hang out. It's almost like if you were dating somebody, you wouldn't say, well, let's get married and see how the first three months work out. It's a dangerous thing. Like, yes, I agree that you'll know a lot when they come and hang out with you. But you can also put the systems in place to know everything about them before they show up. Those will be just by understanding the right very pointed questions to ask them about your core values, to ask them about the skills. So it would be things like, tell me about, you know, your least favorite employee that you've worked with recently, who pisses you off at work day to day and how do they piss you off? How do you piss people off at work? Like really throw it out there. Really ask the tough question. So have you ever had any training in interviewing?

Not necessarily formal. It's been more death by fire from the previous job. And current it's just like, hey, well guess what, you're a leader now. You're interviewing hundreds of people. But so necessarily anything specific to interviewing.

And so there's experiential there, right? But imagine if you also had some training that could show you that all the interviews you've done, you've done wrong. And then all of a sudden you learn the skill set. And it would be like playing baseball or playing cricket. Like I've played lots of baseball as a kid. And then all of a sudden I'm at baseball practice and somebody's coaching my son. They're like, no, hold your elbow. I'm like, I had no idea that there was a way to do this. Like my whole life I've been playing it wrong. Or I've been playing golf my whole life. And I had no idea that I wasn't using my lower body properly until I saw something. So even though we have the experience of having done it, it's time that you guys at your leadership team actually got some skill development around the core skills of running a company. Like really get trained on how to run meetings, really get trained on how to do one on one coaching. Really get trained on how to use situational leadership. Really get trained on how to do interviewing. Really get trained on how to do coaching. Time management. It's as important that you get the skill development there because you've probably gotten a lot of training and skill development and done courses on digital marketing. You didn't learn all that just by doing. Like you probably learned it's time that you learn from some experts there, and it doesn't have to be me. You really want to get anyone in your company who manages people getting skills around running a company, and none of it can be about marketing. It all has to be the soft skills and the people side of things. And I talked to a CEO recently, and he said the same thing. He's like, oh, I've interviewed 100 people. I said, well, maybe you've done all 100 of them wrong. He's like, holy, right? Like, I'd never thought of it that way. It allows you and Rohan to step back and to look at the whole company more holistically and say, how do we look at every area of the company the way that we used to? Just look at marketing. You know, even if you've done acquisitions, you learn how to acquire a company based on some experience. But there's also playbooks out there. I have an amazing M and a firm that I've introduced companies to over the last 11, 12 years that really guides people through doing acquisitions in a way that allows you to learn. Yes, from experience, but also from their experience. Having done it 100 times. Kind of like going to a marriage counselor, we can learn. Like, I'd be the last person to give marriage advice because I've gone through two divorces, so I have the experience of having done it twice. And then I talk to a marriage counselor who's talked to thousands of married couples, and every time I tell her something, she's like, she tell. I'm like, oh, like, I didn't realize, like, there were actually systems here.

No, for sure. And that's something that we're always, you know, it's not like we're not aware of that. I would say we are absolutely aware of that fact. It's now at a point where it's like, time to place and prioritization. We're happy to do that. But at this current state, like right now in Q4, it's like, we need to prep for Q1 once we're able to, you know, step back a little bit and be able to spend more time with that coaching and training and things like that. We're going to absolutely be, you know, spending a ton of time there, because I don't think.

I don't think you'll ever have time in your calendar for coaching unless you put the time in your calendar for coaching. And it doesn't. Again, this isn't coaching with me. It's almost like allocating four hours a week for skill development around the Areas of running a company, whether it's doing an online course, like we had a COO who was in the CEO alliance. They're like, you know, I don't have time to do my calls or I feel guilty. My CEO sees me listening in on calls. I'm like, that could be the most important two hours of your week. When the best athletes in the world, right, whether it's a basketball player or baseball, hockey, whatever, have had coaching their entire life. They've gone to practice their entire life. They've done role plays, they've watched videos. Like, if they've got game day, hand practice, I think we need to build that into our calendar more as executives to always be training. Like salespeople are always getting sales training. Don't be afraid of that stuff or don't use the excuse that we're busy, we're doing, you know, because it's like, you will always be pushing that off, right?

I'm not saying it in the, in the way of like, we're too busy right now. It's more so like the prioritization. Right now we're just really pushing through the vision values as we finish out this acquisition. And then it's more going back to leadership, then it's going more back to high level. How can we make the company better and like, step out of operating it? But right now we're having to really focus in on and guiding the ship is really where we are right now. That's kind of our main focus because in our specific use case and scenario, it's like, we do things and then say, we'll do it, we'll follow up with it and hold people accountable for two, three weeks and then we forget about it. Whereas, like, we committed this quarter, we're like, no, we're getting everything in line. Steering the ship in the right direction so that we get the culture ready to rock so that when Q1 comes, we're not having to jump in and firefight with every single little thing. Because realistically, the two things that we were talking about is creating room for to over deliver, right? That's something that we've never done. Well, our team's on Slack 24 7. You know, send us a message and we'll fix it. And then I'm up at 11:59 fixing some fire that could have been fixed in seconds if we just thought about it prior to or created the room to over deliver, where it's like, hey, actually, we're offline from this time to this time. Like, if you need anything Please go here. Or if it's an emergency, 911, like hey, tagax, handle 911. This is the scenario, right? Yeah. You're we have in place now you're.

Doing the right thing with making sure that everybody's completely aligned with culture. Because if you had very skilled up people but all going in the wrong direction, it's probably pointless. Right. So culture and vision is critical. What you just said, I want to switch gears in a second. But when you talked about the over deliver. Years ago I was coaching a client called Tinuity. They used to be called Elite SEM. I coached them from 40 employees up to 300. They're digital marketing agency. They've now got about 1700 employees. And I coach their CEO, their COO and four of their directors for four years. They used to in the very early days tell all their customers, you can call us 24 7, we're always available. I'm like, no, you're not available. You're in the shower, you're not available. You're having sex, you're not available. Sleeping, you're not available. So all you've done is set yourself. So yeah, we will respond to every email within 24 hours. Right? We will respond to text messages but. And then over deliver and wow them. Be careful with over promising. So it's good that you caught that one already.

It's that acquiescing that like has really shot us in the foot a whole lot. And a lot of the times it comes down on the leadership team. For the most part. One of our guys just goes, oh yeah, I'll speak to the team and I'll get back to you tomorrow. It's not like, okay, well why couldn't you just say Friday or like following Monday or whatever it may be. If you're speaking to multiple individuals with multiple different schedules, be quick to respond to the clients and get to it. But it doesn't mean get to it and say, I'll have an answer for you now. You know, it may take time to get to that answer. So give yourself the room to over deliver is something that we're using that as sort of the mantra around the office. It's like whenever somebody says something, it's like, give yourself room to over deliver. You know what I mean? Or give the other guys room to over deliver and do that as well.

And it's also interesting culturally, if you ask the client, how soon do you need to hear back from me? They'll often say, oh, next Tuesday's okay. It's like, wow, I just got five buffer days because the reality is they're dealing with 17 things as well. Right? So yes, systemizing, that is interesting. I want to talk about your expanding services because I know that you guys are expanding your P and L and having more products and more services than you used to have. Do you have a simplified PL for each product and service? Do you measure the ROI of all of the inputs like the people, time and money to deliver each of the products and services? And do you think about the pain and the factor of each of the products and services?

So that's exactly the exercise I'm going through right now with my bookkeeper. We are pulling because October 1st is our year end. What we're now doing is we're pulling our previous fiscal year going through not only pulling profitability all the way down to each client, also the team members to that customer as well as, let's say for instance, some of our guys. You're managing millions of dollars and worth of budget. However, some guys do it in five hours, some guys do it in 25 and trying to find the difference in there and who's most profitable, who's keeping the longest LTV of some of our guys. They may not be managing the biggest budgets, but they have clients that they've managed for four years, five years. There's something to be said about the customer service that has been provided to keep somebody for that length of time going through that. We know our stick, our turn points and our sticking points. So that's something that we're dialed in. We're looking at profit centers currently. One thing that I've always found hard from my previous job, it was easier when we're talking about bookkeeping because everyone was on an hourly rate. If you think about it, you know, you're paid hourly, you check in, you check out, you time in, time out. You know, it's quite simple to track who's doing what and be able to associate a profitability to that. Now being in the service industry, it's a little harder considering, let's say, for instance, you know, our account managers and media buyers are generally our front facing team that are driving majority of the profitability. However, they can't do their job unless the leadership team's not a part of that as well as the support staff as a part of that. So there's video, video editors, graphic designers, copywriters, funnel editors, automation teams, all these things below that. Let's say, for instance, if I want to say, hey, we have a client spending or we brought in A client that spends a hundred thousand dollars a month, we've brought them up to $500,000 a month and spend that correlates to their ROI. Internally that we're tracking all these things now, that's a growth of 400,000 from when we brought them in, which is great. We're doing a phenomenal job. However, how do you tie specifically how much of that 400,000 goes into the support staff itself? And how do you divvy it up? The way I looked at it is if I take all the pieces of the company and look at it as 100% whole, just slice it and talk. I asked everybody in the company, I said, how much do you think account managing is weighted? Media buying is weighted, you know, all of these different sectors out of 100% buy, what drives the most profitability? Are they even split? You know, what has more, what has less. It was almost a pretty similar outcome, I would say. So it was like 20% account managing, 20% media buying, 15% copywriting, 15% automation, 15% this. So then I said, okay, cool. Essentially I split up that pie in the percentages that we got. I took the total revenue that we brought in in terms of obviously taking out fixed overheads, things like that. And then what I do is I associate. Let's say, for instance, if we're looking at 100% income, 45% goes to labor. So in the service based industry, if labor is always going to be one of your, your highest costs, right, it's generally, number one, marketing and other things come a little bit lower. And then when you do it yourself, it flops. It does the opposite inverse effect. So for us, I take that 45% and then I go, okay, take total rev, take out 45% and then break out that 45% into those percentages and go, this is the impact of revenue these departments had. Then I took that impact, split it up by how many employees per that department evenly. And that's not a fair way of doing it. But what I wanted to do was look at team impact. Who's the strongest on the team, who's the weak link on the team essentially. And then what I did was I went and because I track all of their individual spends and managements, I did the actual ROI comparatively to team roi to see kind of where they fall out in the team, within the team. And then for client basing and roi profitability for the company.

Are you getting, do you have a fractional CFO who has specialized in the, you know, marketing services space helping you analyze because there's experts out there that have done this 150 times who might be able to, for a very low amount of money, come in and help you because it is important that you A, do it the way you're doing it and B, also build some visibility inside the organization. So employees think of it this way. But what tends to happen when you're in the 30 employees to 100 employee zone is a few things. Number one is every manager's answer to every problem tends to be hire more people. And that's actually the wrong answer to almost every problem. When you get to the hundred, all of a sudden you have real leaders who are thinking about optimization and automation and saying no. They're analyzing the amount of people, time and money to generate gross margin. They're looking at gross margin as contribution margin and they're analyzing that. Because what can happen is your more junior employees who are working really hard end up trying their best on certain things, but their best is costing twice as long. Every email that takes 14 minutes instead of six and every design element that takes an hour instead of 20 minutes, or every extra person that's coming to a meeting. You know, Steve Jobs was very misunderstood where he would walk into a meeting, he'd be like, why the are you here? He wasn't being a dick. He just intuitively understood the ROI of every person, every hour and every dollar in terms of the ability of those three things to generate gross margin. And he was able to look at certain products and services and say, you know what? For the pain in the of that product, we're going to kill it. We would be better off saying to the customers, we don't even do that anymore versus working so hard to earn that revenue that's only contributing 7% gross margin or 20 versus 45, you know what I'm saying?

We could always roundabout tell you where our profit centers were, but it was never like, here's exact profit centers, here's the percentage that it's driving, here's the actual number down to the penny. Like that was something that we never had. Whereas now we do have, we have a practical CFO that's helping us currently. We. I also brought in a new bookkeeper that's, you know, helping us kind of iron this out. I've also previous to letting our two financial companies go, learned a lot in between the two of them because both of them had their own specialties and like one didn't understand service based, but they understood everything else. And they were really good at when we went from DASH to accrual base. They were really good at helping us with the accrual side of things, helping us, you know, work with our things like that. The other one was really good on the actual service side of things, but they were really bad when we switched to accrual. So we just let them both go. And we brought in house financials. More like full time bookkeeper sits next to me. We go through things on a daily basis. You know, we're analyzing every day. But I think there is still one more person that I want to bring in that's more of a senior analyst of some kind that's like exactly that, a fractional analyst, specifically to pick apart those numbers and tell me, hey, this looks right or this looks wrong or why is this being inflated or deflated or what have you.

Yeah. So you're approaching it in all the right way. Do your employees understand that that's why you're looking at it that way too?

Not yet. So the reason I'm doing this currently is because Our Town Hall Q4 Town hall is going to be coming up here pretty shortly. So what I'm going to be doing is presenting a lot of these numbers that we've come to find and say, hey, let's get your buy in on this and figure out how can we make these things better, how can we push the company forward through looking at these numbers. What do we want to do? What do we want to take away? What do we want to subtract? Something that we always used to do, we haven't done in a while is every quarter, you know, we vote on our wor client and just let them go, even if they were a pretty high dollar revenue client. However, now moving forward it's like, okay, well you guys all voted on this client. Tell me how we're going to make up the revenue of this client with all the other clients if we let them go. You know, you have to give me that information if we're going to do this. Like I was talking about earlier, we would love to change the compensation structure to be more driven to incentivizing very much around not only client growth, but client roi client LTV client lts you.

Also, what you want to do is culturally. You also culturally want to create a norm where your employees are looking for waste, where your employees are looking to optimize. So where employees can come in and say, hey, I noticed something. We can do this better. Right? It's almost like artificial intelligence. The only employee that should be worried about AI are The employees that are not leveraging AI, we should be celebrating the ones who come in and say, hey, I noticed a way. So I'll give an example. Years ago when I was coaching Tenuity, I talked to their six people that I was coaching, the four directors, the COO and the CEO. And I said, when you guys were starting a company when There were only 20 of you and you were the six managers, you were all managing accounts? And they said, yeah. I said, how many accounts on average did you each manage? And it was like 6, 7, 8, 6, 7, 8. And then I said, how many accounts are your managers managing now? And they said, three or four. Like, so you guys were building the f cking company and we're managing six or seven clients. How is it that we've built a company now where all they do is manage people and you're still building the company for them and now they're managing less? They said, well, we got lazy or we got sloppy or we let them like people. Sadly, what happens is they work expands to fill the space that we give it. It's Parkinson's law, right? Where the amount of time that people take to do something or the budget people will spend on something is bigger because we let them get sloppy. I remember years ago, I walked into Kimbal Musk's office, Elon's younger brother, and every single person in the company had this workstation that was a fold up table from Costco, was their desk. Everyone had an expensive laptop and headset and a beautiful Herman Miller chair. But they didn't allow people to waste money on desks. So they just got these fold up tables. And if we build a culture now that pushes against that. So measure revenue per employee, measure gross margin per employee. Do you measure that, by the way? And do you measure against historically per quarter for the last three years?

No, we've never done it per employee. We've always done it per department.

Measure revenue per employee, gross margin per employee, and salaries as a percentage of revenue. Because as you scale, your revenue per employee should grow, your gross margin per employee should grow, and your salaries as a percentage of revenue should decline. Look at that on a quarter by quarter basis for the last three years, which is very easy to pull those data points and then show those data points to the employees and say, hey, we're not criticizing anybody, but we've got opportunity to get more efficient. We have to look for efficiency. Years ago when we were building college pro painters, we had 8,800 people painting houses and the CEO hired people to sit at job sites with stopwatches and record how long it took people to paint certain items so that we could actually create baselines for the amount of work people were doing. That's what's where your real margins are going to come in as you guys scale as well when you nail that down because you'll get to, and then you'll get to a point where you can't be any more efficient. Like we're, you know, plus or minus 5%. We're good.

We would always do weekly calls, hour long calls with all of our clients. As the client base grew, we were adding more calls, less work was being done. I'm like, what the, how are we going to scale this? I said, okay, everyone's going to 30 minute calls. 30 minute calls literally doubled the amount of time we had on hand. And I was like, holy. Like that's huge. And then again we grew the client base and then we didn't have enough time. And I'm like, well, what do we do? We can't make it shorter than 30 minutes. I said, all right, we're switching to every two weeks. So then we switched every two weeks. I opened up a whole bunch of more time, right? And then we did a loom and a call alternating so that they were still getting an update every single week. So it didn't look like the, the client was taking a, a brunt hit. But you know, it made us more efficient. We, our calls got tighter, we started leading calls more. There was less problems, less dilly dallying on the calls. You know, it was like, get in, get out, explain what's happening, what we're doing. They get out and go because they, there's back to back calls just constantly being run. And we're doing that right now with our video department team. And I'm tracking not only unique new videos, but also resubmissions or re editions of edits of videos, right? Tracking that actual volume because some guys are pumping out. I'm looking at it, I'm going, last month we did, let's call it 200 videos. 80 of them are unique and 120 of them are resizing and smaller things. But majority of the unique videos are being done by like three people. And then all the resizing is done by like one guy or two guys. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, what, what, what is happening here? Why is this guy taking so long to do things that are so easy, whereas you guys are pumping out all these like crazy big videos in the same time that he's pumping out like 30 second videos. This is ridiculous. Like what's going on? So now we're really focusing in it on exactly like very, very specific areas like that. It's been a struggle because, you know, we pay for the most part. Everyone's on a salary base. It's a little bit easier to deal with on the accounting side of things, but it's making our life a little bit harder now to track the profitability by being a lot more accurate, having to make assumptions of how long they spend on a specific client. So let's say for instance, like graphic designers will work on our entire clients, but account managers and media buyers will only work on their clients, which could be anywhere from two to 10 clients at a time. The account manager, media buyers are spending up to 20 hours a week on one client, whereas the graphic designers are spending two hours a week on a client. We're trying to really figure out how can we record that time so that we're able to allocate and say, hey, this is how much time you should be spending to record or I mean to edit a 2 minute video or 30 minute BSL. To be able to launch a campaign, to be able to, you know, do X, Y and Z is really piquing my interest. But it's taking so much time to just get done.

Okay, you guys are approaching all this right away. I've got a question on your client stuff. You mentioned doing calls with clients, then switching them to every two weeks, then alternating loom, which is great. How many people on your team attend one of those client calls?

Typically generally it's two. It's always two. It's the account manager and the media bar. Because the account manager is more creative, more maternal, talking about taking care and managing the client, task management projects, stuff like that. And the media buyer is very logical, comes in with like, this is our plan, this is our strategy, this is what we're doing on the advertising end. This is what we're testing. Here's the numbers, let me break it all down for you, et cetera. So they come in from either end, handle front and back. And then from time to time, let's say if there's a fire or something that you know, they need leadership to come in for, they'll pull us in. Or if they're cross selling, they're not allowed to actually push their cross sell, they have to bring in one of our sales members to fully cross sell them and set all the correct expectations. That's when they'll see more people or if they need, you know, our creative director to come in and give advice on creatives or whatever. It may be like consulting on that call for a little bit. That's when we'll bring more people. But generally, it's two people always. One person is leading the call, one person's taking notes, and then the other person leading the call.

That's good because you're so. You're not. You're not having seven people showing up to a call. One of the things that drives every client.

I can't stand in it.

Yeah, it drives the clients crazy because, like, why do I have all these people showing up on my account and not saying anything? Not contributing. Not like, I hate it.

We literally. I mean, this sounds terrible, but the one thing that we've always been weak at at Grow Rev, I would say, is. Is running really, really sophisticated calls internally, like, externally for clients. It's dialed to the point we. We know because it was preferred. Right. Internally. We've never had a, you know, structure or found something that was applicable to the entire team that everyone was excited to show up for. Because I think a call, let's say, for instance, like. Like. And the reason I'm saying this is because we just canceled our weekly calls. Team calls. We just canceled them. I was like, we're not doing this anymore. We would have 30 people show up to a call, and half the people are just sitting on their phones or looking away from the camera, like, looking down. It would drive me insane. I would ask a question, and they'd be like, I didn't hear that. What? And I was like, oh, my God, I'm gonna lose my mind. There's 30 of us on here. That's literally 30 hours in totality wasted, all of us sitting here. We've done this every single week for the last 48 weeks, since the beginning of the year, whatever, however many weeks there is. But I could not send it. So last week, I jumped on with our head film it, and I was like, we're canceling calls. We're done. Nope, no more. Right now, we're going to see what happens in terms of client buyers. We're going to see what comes up. We're going to ask for feedback and say, listen, we're canceling this. Not because you guys bitched and this and that. It's. We're canceling this right now because we want your feedback. And if you don't provide the feedback, we're going to give you what we want out of this. And it's not going to be pretty for them because it's going to make sure that they have to give us a huge document and have it all prepared for that Monday meeting every single time. And if they don't, there's going to be obviously reprimand for that.

So this is one of the things that I cover in my book Meeting suck is companies should not have a Monday meeting. Companies should not have a weekly meeting. Companies shouldn't have a team meeting. We should have a finance meeting. We should have a weekly action review meeting. We should have a business area review meeting. We can have a daily huddle. We can have an annual planning meeting, or an annual strategy meeting, or an annual training meeting. But the meetings need to be about specific things and they need to be called whatever those specific things are. There's only a few reasons why you bring all of the employees together. An all hands meeting is pointless. Like an all hands meeting. To do what?

Of course.

So there's only two types of all hands meetings. The first one is a town hall where the leadership team asks questions and listens. Where the employees talk to the leadership team and tell us what's going on and we get to listen. It's like the President of the United States going to a shopping mall, having a town hall meeting and listening to constituents. The second style of meeting is like the state of a union. That's when the leadership team has all the employees and we update the employees on our strategy, our culture direction, we talk to them about our metrics, where we're up, what we're doing going forward. But to have all your employees together for anything else is pointless. Unless it's kind of that daily huddle. But that's a seven minute meeting, not an hour meeting.

We can the daily huddles. Like last year, we were doing standups first thing in the morning and same exact thing it was. We had a format in which like, what do we do yesterday? What are we doing today? What do we need help with? Kind of scenario that was kind of. I can't remember what the exact phrase was anymore, but it was something along those lines. And same thing. People will show up, be like, this is what I'm doing today. This is what I did yesterday. I can't remember what I did. So I'm just gonna put this bull in here. And I'm like, what the. And then it's like, what do I need help with? Nothing.

Here's the change. And this is what we did at 1-800-got junk because we ran Daily Huddle. We started Daily Huddle in 2001, it's 2023. They've run Daily Huddle every day for 22 years. What we realized when we got to about 20 or 30 employees was you can't have every employee speak at Daily Huddle anymore. You had a business area to speak every day. So on Monday, marketing would speak on Tuesday, finance would speak on Wednesday, it would speak on Thursday. We gave the employees a chance to share good news or missing systems. But it was pointless to get everybody to talk because like I'm doing what I always do, I'm doing the same. I'm always a payroll clerk. But we realized that Daily Huddle had to be changed in tweaked. And if you follow that simple system, the seven minute Daily Huddle, but you follow the system we did at 1, 800 got junk. It will definitely scale. The problem with what you bumped into is exactly what we bumped into.

And it was the most frustrating thing on planet Earth because again, same thing, right? Even though seven minutes, it's like seven minutes every single day across 30, 40 people.

It was a bad agenda. But it's the right, it's the right meeting. And the reason the Daily Huddle is so powerful when you write it with the system or run it with the system, I'll give you, I also cover it in the book meeting. So I. When you run a Daily Huddle following the proper system, it gets everyone on the same page. It motivates them, it aligns them. You share any of the key metrics. So here's the key data points that happen with Daily Huddle. The metrics that you reported Daily Huddle are the same metrics for three months and then every quarter you come up with new metrics for that quarter to report a Daily Huddle. Okay, that's so it keeps it fresh. Number two, you don't run it at 8 o' clock or 9 o' clock in the morning. Run daily huddle at 11 o'.

Clock.

It's the first point in the day when energy level drops. So the best time is you run at 11 o' clock or 2 o', clock, the energy drops. It's when people want their smoke break. So they need a break. They need to like they need a snack or whatever. So Daily Huddle can boost the energy. You run it as an, as a stand up seven minute meeting, no longer than seven minutes. You start off with sharing good news. Now this is when you have to behind the scenes push people to share good news. You got to push the remote people to share. And it's. You also need to, if you're going to share, like, read an email. Don't read the entire damn email. Just read the bullet point. Condense the whole story. I don't need the seven minute story. I need the 12 second story. I even canned clapping at Daily Huddle because I don't need to hear people clap for seven seconds on the four things that we share because that took up 28 seconds of seven minutes. I don't need to spend 5% of the meeting listening to the clap. So the system was wrong. Daily Huddle was right.

And that's what I always thought. Right. And the biggest thing is as a digital company, what's hard for people to really think about is right now there's, I think 10 people in the office, but there's 40 people worldwide. You don't get to see what everyone's doing. You know, like the left hand doesn't see what the right hand's doing and you don't have that like camaraderie of like, hey, let's jump on, you know, we're all going to war today. There's flights that we got to fix or this we got to do. But we all know that we're playing part when we meet together and then we go our separate ways and do our shift, right? It builds this like pseudo culture or like reliability on everyone knowing that everyone's showing up for this call, listening into the call and then going off and doing their thing.

So, and what's really cool when you get each business area reporting on a weekly basis. So when, when IT reports every week, all of a sudden after four weeks, five weeks, six weeks of hearing an IT update and the the same updates, what's going well, what's not to going going well, what they're working on and where they're stuck the next day. Marketing updates, what's going well, what's not going well, what you're working on, where you're stuck. All the employees start to get a perspective. Oh, this is how all the moving parts work together. This is how IT and finance and operation and sales all work together. But they're not having to do the updates is they're. The head of the business area is doing the updates on that daily basis. When we started it, we only had 30 employees and it was awkward. So we had to tweak it. We had to tweak it. We had to tweak it and it just got better every time. But don't throw the baby with the bathwater on this one.

Going back to it, we just don't know what that schedule, that agenda is going to look like. Bringing it back, but making it more of a cultural call. The Monday all hands where it's like shoot the shit lunchroom type scenario to where we could do fun activities together as a team. Something that we were also potentially thinking about doing in terms of an all hands. But I definitely don't think necessary to have that, you know, Monday meeting anymore. To where it's just a Monday meeting. Like to have a Monday meet. It's just, it's irrelevant. Nobody's there to. Who cares, you know, no one gives a shit unless it's State of the Union or there's a big reason behind it. Then what's the point, right? We do our town halls every quarter. We could do a State of the Union, but like, is it really necessary if we do our town hall? Because generally we cover majority of that in there.

Here's how you do it. Do a State of the Union twice a year and do a town hall twice a year. So do State of the Union in January and July and then do your town hall meeting in April and October. So your town hall, you're asking questions and listening the State of the Union, you're giving the updates. And they can be one hour calls for everybody in the company. Jam group events. They run online social events for hybrid companies and remote companies and they're super fun and it's like $25 an employee to get them to run it all for you. But they do like music trivia, online, Escape Room, Family Feud. It's like you and you just get to show up and have fun. I've run a bunch of them for our CO alliance and everybody loves them for the money. I would highly encourage doing a couple of those a year and just getting this, this group jam group events to run them for you guys because they can be really fun.

Do you think there's anything that, you know, I could spend time on that would be in my blind side that I wouldn't know because I haven't been past that 40 employee area that you wish you had known about that to where you would have stopped or done something earlier off?

Yeah, the two big things that I wish I'd done more of. One was to delegate faster and to delegate everything. You know, I hear this so often. Well, I can't delegate this because no one on my team has the skills. Great, delegate it to them anyway and then spend your time growing their skills. So it's our job is to grow people and it's to grow their skills and confidence so that we can delegate everything on our leg list. And that can be delegate acquisitions. That can be delegate interviewing senior people. That can be delegate managing the fractional CFO to oversee the ROI of each of the things. The key is if you keep focusing on growing people's skills and confidence and delegating everything, that's what really will scale up the organization super fast. And then second is to really learn to say no. More often than we say yes, we tend to become a very inclusive company and wanting to be nice to people and wanting to be liked. And sure, let's get everybody's opinions. Every once in a while we have to make the call. But we can explain the why behind the no. It's not like mom and dad said no because I said so and it's my home. You can give the reason for the no. It's like, no because it's not on plan. No because it's not on strategy. No because we want people to stay focused whatever the but we have to learn how to artfully say no to people and not worry that people's opinions or feelings are going to get hurt. Like we can't be in the Everybody gets a participation ribbon.

I would say those are probably my two weakest points are that exact those two exact things that I've been focusing on.

You know, every leader who's at the 30 employee marks need to learn those two skills.

Definitely where I'm going to be putting my time.

Rohit, thanks very much for sharing. I really appreciate you doing this and also being completely open as well as a coaching call too. So I appreciate the vulnerability and openness.

Likewise, thank you for putting that offer out there and helping all these entrepreneurs like myself get to where you've been. It's definitely something that's extremely important for all of us. Like you said, you got to put that time aside to grow yourself.

So don't stop now. Click here. There's more great videos that you can keep learning from and together we're unlocking amazing leadership lessons together.